I thought awhile back that I had said all I had to say on dating. However my last post was so popular (or at least controversial) that I have decided to say some more. So here goes.
In NYC it is commonly understood that the single women vastly outnumber single men.
“How can you be single, in this town where girls outnumber guys like 10-to-1?” some girl asked me a few months back, right after H. and I broke up.
“As a single guy you can do really well in this town if you don’t live with your parents, have a decent job and have your shit together,” my handsome friend B.W. told me a little while back. (Or some words to that effect)
My friend Tallman seems to be constantly fighting off the ladies, yet muses that he has attractive female friends who seem to go months or even years without being in relationships.
And I have to agree that it my sense also, that single girls outnumber guys in this town.
I wanted to do a blog post about this, and did some research awhile back, but there’s really only one problem with this theory: the numbers don’t really support it. I looked up census data, it seems to show that there are 9 men in NYC for every 10 women. Not exactly a breathtaking ratio. I thought maybe the big immigrant population here might sway things, but even if you just look at native-born Americans the ratio isn’t really that out of whack. (8.9 men per 10 women in nyc)
Tallman also posited that because maybe our generation was pretty small (our class of ’94 was the smallest in our college‘s history) and because men tend to date younger women, there might be even fewer guys for girls in their early 30s out there. However looking at this table of live births I’m not sure the data supports that.
My friend Michael Malice also researched this when he was working on some dating TV show, and told me he couldn’t find much evidence to support the notion that single women really outnumber men here.
Of course the census data doesn’t really tell you who’s really in the dating game. There aren’t numbers for single professionals, height-to-weight proportional, aged 25-34, living in Manhattan, good parts of Brooklyn, Astoria and Hoboken. But you just have to use what’s available.
(Before anyone says it, the number of married men here should equal the number of married women, right? This isn’t Utah. I’ll concede there are probably more gay men than lesbians here, though).
So what is it, an urban myth? Thinking about this a little more, it does seem like while I have attractive women friends who don’t have much luck dating, I also know girls who have more than their fair share of suitors. One of my female friends met three guys in one night last week. And of course I know guys who also have troubles with the ladies. Clubs without door policies often end up with more men than women, I think.
Sometimes it does seem like certain women are, uh, maybe a little more apt to voice their greivances on the NYC dating scene, while guys just deal. So maybe it is just a myth?
I am eager to hear from my commenters on this.
[…] But at the moment my plate is completely empty. I was rather excited about the girl from Nikki Beach I took to a gay bar the other day, but it looks like she’s moving to L.A. (Boo!) And I have pretty much given up on the v. confused pseudo-lesbian uber-hottie I’ve been pursuing for months now. I did my best to save her from a lifetime of loveless sex and superficial connections, but it appears she didn’t want to be rescued. […]
This is a very interesting topic. One thing that has not been discussed is the fact that there are much more women in manhattan who would be considered good looking than men. I work in a publc building and a female co-worker suggested as a way to make the day pass more quickly, to try an experiment where she would count the attractive men who entered the building and I would count the attractive females. The females outnumered the men by a large margin. I suggest others to try this in any public place and report your results.
Hmm. I sorta agree with that. But I’m a guy, I don’t find men attractive in general. I wonder if the results of your experiment would be any different elsewhere in the country? This also goes to the idea of there being a “superstar effect” for men — that women find only a small percentage of guys incredibly hot.
You can spend a lot of time thinking about this… is it just a matter of perception, or are women really objectively better-looking than men? What does it mean to be attractive, anyway?
So all this being said, where should two cute single girls in their 20’s head to…where’s the new city to be in. According to a census map, the highest ratio is in Alaska and Colorado…who’s in?
We are feeling that, in NYC in particular, the women are pretty, smart, interesting and of course we are then put into the bowl of *eye candy*. Then we look at our selection of men, and find that they are not putting in as much effort to impress…but who can blame them with this ratio! its exhausting.
Phoenix, San Diego and Dallas all have more men than women, according to the 2000 census. And It’s about even in L.A. and Houston. There was a funny story about the dating scene in Alaska in the Times awhile back.
Hi Derek,
Could you please contact me at your earliest convenience? I’m a reporter on tight deadline and would like to do a quick interview with you.
Thanks so much,
RNK
are you busy Saturday night?
Haa… actually, yeah.
You know, I’ve been pondering over this same issue myself lately. Why is it these areas that are supposed to have a 10-women to 1-man ratio, how is it so hard to pick up any females. That just doesn’t make any sense with these kinds of numbers! Then I looked up the U. S Census Bureau statistics, and their numbers verified my suspicions that there was a great discrepancy in that pretty much in most of the U. S. there is a 10-women to 9-MAN ratio. In fact in many parts of the U. S., particularly in rural areas, the number of men actually exceed women. All you have to do is look around you. I know of a lot of guys without female companionship, but I don’t know of not a one–not a one–woman without male companionship! To the females that challenge these statistics, they hardly qualify to know the issues men face because for one, they are not guys, and two, they never have problems finding male companionship.
>> I know of a lot of guys without female companionship, but I don’t know of not a one–not a one–woman without male companionship!
See, come to New York. My guy friends and I — obv., I have a high opinion of myself, and I think my friends are great — but we’re not GQ models, y’know? And we do fairly well. (Some of my friends, very well). And yet I know some attractive, well-put-together girls who do go a long time w/o male companionship.
This video reminds me a hell of a lot of dating in New York – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqkmXgAUTB8
No actually, 9 to every 10 is a tragically huge difference. (That means for every 1,000 women there are only 900 men!) Also, it *is* out of whack with the national average- on the globe overall, there is a slighter higher ratio of more men than women born.
The general tendency is that the American west is more male than female- all along the east coast there are significantly more women; and in rural areas there are more men, whereas urban centers consistently have more women. This is a long-known rule, going back as far as the very masculine environments of the Old West and gold mining towns..often there were women back on the east coast…
Susan, yes, in general there’s something between 107 and 105 boys born worldwide for every 100 girls. But those girls are more likely to survive to their first birthday … and pretty much every year after that. Boys are actually more fragile than girls in a lot of ways.
Here’s something from the Census Bureau that illustrates this. (figure 3). In the 2000 Census, there were 104.8 boys under five years old for every 100 girls… but the ratio of for ages 25-34 was only 101.8 men for every 100 women. By the time you get to age 55-64, there’s only 89.4 men per 100 women.
So when you’re looking at gender ratios in terms of dating, it pays to specify the age group. This guy did this on a nationwide “singles map” and it shows that in the NYC metro area (which includes parts of Conn, NJ and Pa.), you don’t actually start seeing more women than men until the 40-44 age bracket.
That said, I feel like gender ratios actually don’t tell much of the story. To copy something I wrote on another blog, looking at population figures is not really relevant because most of us would not date our cab driver from Morocco or maid from Ecuador. Most of us want to date people who are our equals as far as education, socioeconomic status, attractiveness and so on. (Many are also not that open to interracial dating, although some are).
Even in Manhattan, according to the 2007 American Community Survey:
* only 57% of pop over 25 has a bachelor’s degree or higher
* 16% didn’t finish high school
* 18% speak English less than “very well”
* 48.8% of the population is white, 13.7% black, 10.7% Asian and 24.7% is Hispanic or Latino
Basically for most of us the pool of “dateable” people is much much smaller than the general population. And alas there’s no population figures for the gender ratio of graduates of moderate or better colleges with stable jobs and no criminal records. Also the dating pools for men and women are very different (men tend to date younger women, women date older; a guy with an elite job is I think far more likely to date an unaccomplished younger woman; etc.).
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